005 · 7 August 2026
Ollama
The week they stopped selling to individuals
- Layer-down wedge
- Distribution & community
- Local AI runtime
- Series B
- Linear lane
- PLG, Community-led, Bottoms-up to enterprise, Ecosystem & partner
The rule
A distribution loop is not a moat. It is a head start with compounding interest, and the interest stops the moment someone can replace you by changing one line of config.
The copy, then and now
Get up and running with large language models.
Run Llama 3, Phi 3, Mistral, Gemma, and other models. Customize and create your own.
Run open models. Get more usage.
Ollama lets you use open models with your coding agents so you can spend less while keeping your data private.
Why it matters
Put LM Studio, Jan or llamafile on the 2024 line and it still reads true, which means it was never a headline. It was a description of the category. The new line does not survive that swap, because get more usage only means something if you are currently paying someone by the token. They also named who it is for, which is people running coding agents, and what it saves, which is money. Both of those choices turn somebody away, and that is what makes them positioning.
Sources
Every case runs an adversarial fact check before it ships. Anything that cannot be verified against a primary source is cut, not caveated.